


Blue (and the End of the War)

by Radar_One



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Dorks in Love, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Slowest Burn, Unresolved Emotional Tension, dorks in denial more like, frankenstein was probably the real monster, unresolved everything
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2018-04-30 04:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5150633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radar_One/pseuds/Radar_One
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>K-Science attempts to rebuild a shattered science, a life, a pair of shattered brains, and the vast majority of a constantly-shifting partnership, while facing intrusion from some unwelcome visitors</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The concept of a “victory lap” has a lot to recommend it. Especially if you are feeling triumphant.

The door opens with a bang. One half of the (soon-to-be-defunct) K-science division strides through.  He aims a finger at the nearest technical officer.

“Saved you.” He says. 

Still moving, he orients towards a nearby Jaeger tech, and points.

“Saved you.”

He raises a hand to the curious faces along the Gypsy Danger gallery rail.

“Saved you, you, you-” point, point, point, “saved _all_ of you-” a careless wave of the hand- “the power of science ladies and gentlemen,  goodnight!”

He strides out the other door.

A few seconds later, a second man follows. He looks tired, and not a little disgusted.

He turns to the first-addressed tech.

“Forgive him. He's feeling triumphant today.”

He shuffles through.

 

* * *

 

 The Shatterdome has the feeling of a house about to be moved from. Appropriately, it now looks shattered; the roof here has been pulled up in strips. A crane carefully removes another girder as they pass; the operator (a tiny black speck in the cab) waves a hand in recognition. The wind is whipping up other bits of debris; chips of lacquer, paint, torn up scraps of paper, (largely ignored requisition forms, it has to be said) bottlecaps, and the general scurf that comes from, hello, _building and running half-a-dozen-giant-robots_.

This is what he can’t get over, after all this time, It’s wild- it’s _unheard of_ \- humanity put up its dukes against the, the best the fourth dimension had to offer- the Menace From Beyond The Hyperplane- and _wins_.

It inclines a man feel victorious. 

And this is it; after the laughter, the tears, the wild celebration; the 3am trips to Medical, the _4am_ trips to the cafeteria to raid the meagre alcohol supplies, after the grief and the love and the sorrow and joy-

There really is no sweeter feeling than standing on the waterfront and giving the finger to the calm ocean.

Some people think he’s gone mad.

He’s not mad.

No more mad than he was before, anyway.

He feels a hand on his shoulder, and has jerked away, maybe a little too quickly, before he realises-

“Oh- hey, Hermann.”

“’Doctor Gottlieb’.” He gives a full-body sigh. “As ever.”

“Nuh-uh. Nuh-uh, man. I’ve been inside your goddamn _head_. We can never be on anything other than first-name terms _again_.” 

“Oh _lord_. I _knew_ you were going to be insufferable about this.”

“Eeeyuh-huh.” He sidles a little closer, tries to dig an elbow into wherever the man’s ribs might be under that goddamn coat. “We’re buddies now. _Compadres. Amigos.”_

“God in heaven.”

 _“ Fruende_.”

“My mother always told me not to bring home strays. I wonder what she would make of this?” he says, idly, kicking a pebble over the edge. 

“Ha. _We_ should go and visit her, now. As soon as _we’ve_ finished packing up the lab-”

This gets a groan (and they should really being working on that _now_ , says the Hermannian echo in his brain.)

 _“_ But cool your boots, because _we’ve_ got to finish looking over the Nobel deposition-”

“Mmm. I have to admit, that does take the sting out of alleged wound somewhat.” 

“Sure it does. _Buddy_.” He taps out a rapid, alternating pattern on the concrete with his heels- LRLLRLRR- before he is compelled to break the silence. “Should look good on your resume, I mean, right? PHD, Nobel candidate, snappy dresser, gives good chess, _saved the world_.” Another pause, RLRRLRLL- “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to lead with that. I’m going to write that in 48-point font along the top of my _life_.” Pause. “Hermann, if you were going to get a tattoo-“   

“And I’m not,” he says mildly.

“Aww, Come on Herms. Really? Our _brain high-five_ had so little effect?”

“Hmm. I know you think very highly of yourself, Dr. Geizler, but at the time I was more concerned about the- _other_ participant.”    

The water laps at the edge of the concrete. Little bits of debris- rust, splinters of wood- are floating on the idle tide, when he looks down.

They haven’t had _this_ conversation yet.

“Well. Have you got that out of your system?” Hermann’s heels are planted against the breeze coming off the harbour.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“And are you- prepared?”

The air smells of sea-salt and smoke- not smoke from a fresh fire, but the ground-in pollution smell of Kowloon Bay. He breathes deeps anyway.

“Yeah.”

“Excellent. I think it’s the medical wing to the north this time- the place with the white doors.” His glasses are perched on the end of his nose as he checks the tablet, but, really, it’s a pretence. This date- this appointment-clangs in the mind like a gong.

He’s in a trance, a little bit. Not in any way that would necessitate pharmaceutical or therapeutic intervention, or attention by any other medical personnel whatsoever, he hastily amends to himself, but still; watching the water turn from grey to blue and  grey again, as the bay stretches from “harbour” (a man-made thing, a functional delineation as useless as the functional segregation of the brain or, as one of the Hansens had once memorably put it, as useless as tits on a helicopter) to “sea”; a human-constructed word, certainly, but one that encompasses both a thing and a set of ideas so vast that it defies boundaries imposed by anything as functionally petty as words.

This is naturally lost on his colleague, who has a criminal lack of imagination. He harrumphs as he puts the tablet away. “They’d like us there with 15 minutes or so to spare, I believe. To calibrate the machine.”

“Yeah.”

“Fifteen minutes if we start walking _now_ , Newton.”

“Yeah.” He tears his eyes away from the skyline. “Ready to convince these people you have a brain, Herms?”

He snorts as he turns away, but it sounds less than venomous. That’s good. That’s a good sign. Hermann is already walking away, so that’s a good sign.

Everything’s normal.

-

He turns to-

Well, he doesn’t turn _away_ from the waterfront.

It’s the oddest idea- not even something he’s really- but-

Still facing the cool, calm water, he walks back to the door.


	2. Chapter 2

**Operation Pitfall; post-operations**

Someone pulls a drink out of his hand. It might have been water, and it might have been beer. It could have been either one; and he would have been happy with either one, really, because he’s feeling just a _little_ bit out-of-sorts at the minute, and an optimist would say that the (a) possible cause could be _dehydration_ ; so really, he would have been happy with water.

Someone has pulled the plastic cup out of his hand.

The essentially Schroederian nature of this dichotomy, however, will never be resolved, unfortunately, because the cup is gone. Someone poured him the drink and then handed him the drink and then someone else pulled it away.

As it turns out, that person is tall and Australian and it takes him just a split-second over average before he is able to pull those two facts together and come up with Hansen. Gradually, other facets sneak into view, like guilty teenagers returning late from a party- Hansen (senior). Marshall? Unclear.

The word keeps butting persistently into his overview, although maybe it is being forced there by overwhelming circumstantial evidence, viz; the steadily increasing noise level, the content and tone of said noise level (excited, happy human voices, including one-sided voice-pause interactions that can only be phonecalls) textural evidence (viz the press of excited bodies around him) and, of course, the cup. Of what was almost certainly, definitely beer. Because why else would tall, Australian possible-Marshall Hansen take it away from him otherwise?

There are no restrictions on _water_.

“-down to Medical wing, Dr. Gottleib?” Tall Australian Marshall Hansen is saying to a vague white and blue-grey blur in the distance. Newt is forced to wipe a thumbprint of god-knows-what off his glasses, and realises that his glasses are not, in fact, there. He leans forward, extending a hand to the white-blue-grey blur, which hands him his glasses. Once applied, the blur resolves into Dr. Hermann Gottleib. The white is his face.

None of them have had a very easy-going day about this.

“Yes, sir”, says former blur Dr. Hermann Gottleib. He is hooked forward from about T5 and upwards, that’s a bad sign; the sweat is worse, even despite the increasing heat of the control room. His hand is curled around the edge of a console table, in the absence of his cane; his knuckles are white.

He tries to extend a hand forward, to lend support, but he abruptly realises this is (ha) insupportable when something goes wrong in the balance-arena, and he crumples semi-to the ground;  with a saving throw, he manages to mostly land on one knee, which is (he thinks) what modifies Hansen-senior’s look of concern, shock and annoyance from moderate to mild.

 _I am not in a condition to lend support to anyone_ , he thinks vaguely.      

The world rises; Hansen is hauling him upright (and maybe this is the wrong time, but is he sort of _offended_ that he can be picked up and hauled around like that? It seems somehow unfair that the pilots, as well as getting all the fame, kudos, money and fame, also get the whole sculpted-as-like-unto-a-Greek-god thing which means they can achieve things, _physical_ things, off-hand that would take for example a _biologist_ about two months and a good run-up to even _attempt._ )

“Yes, Sir”, Gottleib is saying again, and-yes, someone has retrieved his cane for him. That’s good. That’s good for Gottleib.  He’s wondering vaguely who is going to help _other_ people who might be having an issue with balance at this time, but the world seems to be stabilising, albeit slowly. He tentatively plants one boot down, and then the other; the floor sways woozily, but seems unprepared to try any other manoeuvres.

That’s good. This is all definitely very _good_.

Attention en masse seems to be turning to the entrance at the head of the jaeger bay; it’s a blur from up here, but specks are massing at the giant double doors. The consoles- bright green, bright blue, lines in the darkness- are starting to peep through the press of bodies as more and more people drift door-wards.

One- the one at the head, close to where Tendo and Namirrez and the other J-tech bods sit- is still flashing a red NO DATA sign; and that still seems fairly surreal. Not for what it means, but for what it signifies. It’s not that the monitor is wrong, for once; it’s that the object monitored as disappeared into thin air.

He follows an _invisible_ sightline back from the source and sees Hermann. He looks like he is about to say something, over the chatter of the crowd ( _retrieval team coming in_ , says a voice from the hanger head) but Hansen plucks two or three bodies from the mass currently drifting towards the hangar doors, and more or less sets them on Gottleib. He is lost in a wash of J-tech grey. 

This, as it turns out, is their escort; Newton is chivvied out of the hangar just as a boat engine sputters to a stop. Magnified by the still air, a roar goes up; pilots Mori and Becket are apparently home safe. 

 

* * *

 

 

The rest, admittedly, he sees in bits and patches. For example, he vaguely remembers waiting in the darkened hall of the Medical (Intake) room, as someone argues with someone else ahead of him. 

“-What about Dr. Nguyen?”

“He’s away celebrating, sir.”

“Surely not.”

“Well if he’s not I can’t find him?” The someone-else shrugs a helpless shrug that instantly indicates (to Newt, well-trained in these matters) that the someone-else is only a junior medic; that he was not expecting to act as Med. Intake today; that he was expecting to be called in as triage for Operation Pitfall, not for neuroimaging; that he was not expecting all the monsters _ever_ to be killed today; and he was _really_ expecting Dr. Nguyen to be here, to field questions from irate superior-officers-slash-academics-slash-superior-academics. “Just me, I'm afraid.” 

At this point, one of the J-techs starts to make points in a loud, verbal manner, in Cantonese, with fist-banging-on-the-reception-desk-type punctuation; Hermann is able to retreat. His back hits the wall first; in a more controlled manner, he leans his head (top of the occipital plate) back against the wall. His eyes are closed, and his face, however sweaty and dishevelled, is briefly at rest.

It’s a good look for him.

“Hey man”, he says, “are you okay?”

That’s as much as he remembers from _that_ time period.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up (or, rather, opens his eyes; someone keeps telling him _don’t fall asleep_ , and he doesn’t)   

by pushing a cup of water onto him. It feels cool in his hands.

Water. Retrieval.

“Mako and Raleigh?” he says to the quasi-medical shadow hovering over him.

“They’re in now,” says the shadow briskly. It does something stinging and probably antibacterial to the cut over his eye. It smarts, but he hasn't the energy to jerk away. 

This water is the best thing he has ever tasted.

 

* * *

 

 

He snaps back in.

“Dr. Gottleib says you were hooked up to a malfunctioning drift machine?”

“Uh.” His brain- his magnificent brain- entirely stalls. “Yeah?” There’s too much of a question mark to support the apparent _industrial-espionage lying_ going on here, so he modifies it. “Yeah. To-“

“To test the neural bridge capabilities of the decommissioned Jaeger.” Says Hermann, semi-smoothly; you’d only know he was lying if you’d recently hooked your brain up to his. “We couldn't risk sending the remaining pilots into a vehicle with a faulty Bridge.”   

“Yeah. What he said. We-”

“Quiet, Newton, you’ll _provoke a headache_.” he says, and- Yeah, wow, the drift is handy, but the furious demon-headmaster poker-face rictus Hermann is sending conveys it better. Cards being played close to vest at this juncture. Got it.

 He tries to convey _Mouth shut Got_ it along- not to put too fine a point on it- _telepathic_ lines, but if Hermann got them, he’s not saying anything.  

Happily, the Last Remaining Medic- who Newt is growing fond of, in a sort of entirely-voluntary Stockholm Syndrome sort of way- does not seem to be noticing. Maybe it’s the complexity of the EEG lead he’s currently disentangling, maybe it’s the muffled (but steadily _growing_ ) party-miasma that’s creeping up the hall, from two floors away.   

* * *

 

He’s allowed to sleep after that. Thank whatever.

 

* * *

 

 

He awakes to the sounds of an argument. So at least that’s consistent.

“-why I should _have_ to take them, if I’m not _currently unwell_.” Says a familiar, slightly peevish voice, and yep, that’s familiar too. “I take a number of other medications, which may also impact on my current state, and I seriously doubt if you have had time to consider the effect of this particular- aceta- acetazam-“

He rolls over, though not without difficulty. “Acetazolamide. It’s an anti-epileptic, Hermann, the nice man wants to make sure you don’t have a seizure.” He says. He _thinks_ he says. It’s what he _wants_ to say. He’s sunk deeply into the hospital-type pillows, which are in fact designed for the purpose. The sinking, not ruining someone’s dramatic announcement of their return to consciousness. Using his elbow, he managed to lever himself into a semi-recumbent position, the better for holding forth on functional chemical groups. “Though aren't the whole anhydrase inhibitor family anti-ictal, rather than AED? Surely you’d want to be _promoting_ tonic recovery at this point. But that’s just my thoughts,” he says, “and I _am_ speaking to you from a recovery ward bed apparently? So, you know, consider that colour commentary compromised in whatever manner you deem-”

At that point his elbow gives out, and he is forced into lying back and staring at the ceiling, and contemplating how and why his life got here, from a starting point of nothing, through to _Kaiju_ , through to staring at that particular piece of pseudo-hospital ceiling tile.      

“You’re awake.”   

This is from Dr. Gottleib, though the Last Remaining etc. is giving him a look of quiet gratitude too. (This, he suspects, may be less to do with him being awake, and more to do with Dr. Gottleib’s laser-like focus being taken off the medic.)

“ _You’re_ awake. Should that be happening?”

“No.” Says the medic firmly, but he is cut off by- 

“Hermann”, he says, and wow, his voice is _weird_. “I like the paper gown. Is this- do I sound like this? Now? How long was I asleep?”

“Five hours,” says the medic. “Unlike some.”

“Aw-“ _tired_ , he’s suddenly very _tired_ , and yet he’s been sleeping for five hours, why isn’t he less tired?

“Hermann, get some- “ words- vocal words, are very hard. “Sleep, will you?” The figure on the other bed is silent and, hopefully, a little embarrassed. Good. Serves him right.

Gosh, but this bed is comfortable. He sinks down, semi-voluntarily. “Sleep. Is good.” The retreating back of the medic appears briefly where he thinks the door might be. “Sorry, he doesn't like doctors. I can’t think why.”

The medic-blur is gone.

Gottlieb, as best he can see, is sitting in the other bed, obstinately upright; head up, hands folded neatly in his lap. He has the scrubbed-clean, paper-gowned look of someone who has been hurriedly processed by a multiple of ward staff, and hasn't quite recovered from the experience.

He seems to take up less volume than he ever did before.

“Hey-“ he makes one last attempt at the upright thing- “Hermann. It’s all okay, right?”

The figure turns its head from contemplation of the far wall. “Go back to sleep, Newton.”

Which is _offensive_. “Right back at you-“

He can’t settle on either “pal” or “buddy”; while he is contemplating this, he falls back to sleep.

 

* * *

He sleeps, and dreams of nothing in particular. 


	3. Chapter 3

Mako has decided that she doesn't like something.

This does not sound extraordinary, but it is a small revelation to her. During the war, the nature of “like” and “dislike” is muted, as necessity takes over. Instead, one evaluates an item based on “useful” or “useless.” This morning, when attempting to leave the hotel, the rather oleaginous concierge had asked whether Madame would prefer tea or coffee- and the question had stopped her, momentarily. She has not yet got used to the  _luxury_  of like-and-dislike.

However, she has decided she does not like these shoes.  

“<I don’t like it>”, she mutters to the figure still attempting to knot an acceptable tie. “<What if I want to run?>”

“<You won’t need to be run anywhere. Hopefully.>” Raleigh mutters back. He is relatively certain he has tied his thumb into the knot, and is attempting to remedy the situation without involving anyone else.

“<But  I want the choice.>” she says, shifting. The shoes have heels. Could be useful as a weapon, she thinks absently.

“<You won’t need a weapon. And you won’t need to run anywhere.>”

“<You don’t know that.>”

“<No, but I know you will never need to run, because you could single-handedly whip anyone in the room.>” Raleigh, it must be said, has had his own problems with said shoes; muzzy with sleep (and post-drift connectivity) this morning, he had attempted to step into said heels before reality (and conventional gender restrictions) had asserted themselves.

With a sigh, she steps in front of him; she gently extricates his thumb from the tangled mess, and re-ties the tie. Even if it is not perfect, it is at least acceptable, and that is what they are shooting for just at the minute.      

 “Thanks. You know, I never learned to tie these things properly. I was supposed to learn- ah, from-“

“I know. Where do you think I learned?” she replies.

A brief silence hangs over the elevator, like a grey ball in the air.

He rests a hand on her shoulders. In moments of loss, the Drift conveys much more than words can.

“<Now’s not the time.>” she says.

“<No.>” he says; but he fails to let go.

“<We must go and be the- how is it that you said it? The ‘hot pilots’.>”

“ ’Hotshot’ pilots.”

“hosh-hot”, she says, tasting the word. “<Well. We have to be them.>”

“<Easier for some,>” he says.

A smile creeps onto her lips, and the elevator pings softly to indicate the approaching floor.

The doors open and- yes, the official news lines are waiting in the main hall, but the popular press have set up camp here. As a pair, they square their shoulders.

They’re not perfect; but they can be acceptable for now, until they figure out something better.  

 

* * *

 

 

He awakes to a rake-like figure, hovering in front of him.  

 _Dybbuk_ is on the tip of his tongue, but he bites it down before it can escape- a rarity for him.  Besides, its just Hermann; the fuzzy light of the closed ward curtains has turned him into a thin, dark shadow, or at least thinner and darker than already he was. He’s adjusting his cuffs.

“Aw, and I missed it.” He says, sitting up.

“You should probably still be asleep. What?” Hermann says, still struggling with his cuffs.

“You getting dressed. I wanted to see it. That could have resolved a few essential mysteries. Do you _have_ skin, Hermann? Or is it tweed all the way down? Do you wear, like, underalls, like an old-timey prospector? What’s the sock situation? What are you up for, anyhow? Should I be worried?”

“Just a publicity run. The UN. The first, I’m told, of many.”

He almost knees himself in the face to kick the blanket off.

“Well gimme a second to get dressed. I know they left my pants around here somewhere-“

Hermann is holding up a restraining hand. “The reason you weren't woken up. Mr. Hansen has asked that you remain under the care of the medical staff for a few more days.”   

“Hansen can’t tell me what to _do_.”

“In theory, no. Currently, I think a particularly vicious kitten could knock you about and you’d feel it. _Rest,_ Newton. No-one expects you to be up and about just yet.”

He’s about to argue, but the room sways dangerously around him, and he is forced to sit back down.

“Okay.”

“Heavens. It can listen to reason.” He said dryly. “I asked one of the orderlies to bring up a stack of journals, so you shouldn't want for reading materials. There’s an interesting thing-“

-he’s _still_ fiddling with his cuffs.

“Oh, for god’s- Hermann, come here, will you? You’re making _me_ antsy.”

It’s in Hermann’s nature to reject outright offers of help, but he also detests oddments in his personal surroundings- loose pencil shavings, lost coins, undone buttons. He comes over willingly enough.

“I should be expected to make a recovery with _this_ hanging around,” he mutters, buttoning the presented cuff. (If there is a faint tremor in his own grip, no-one mentions it.) “How are your hands today, anyway?”

“Better, actually.”

“Ha. Probably better than they had been.” He gestures for the other cuff. “When was the last time before today you got 8 hours uninterrupted sleep?”

“2013, perhaps?” he says, smiling his half-smile. “Thank you, Newton; but I must go.” He’s already cutting for the exit. “Rest, won’t you?” he says from the doorway. “And try not to bother the orderlies too much. We may want to come back here,” he calls back.

“Give ‘em hell, Hermann. Tell ‘em about the science. _Represent_. Hermann? Hello?”

The hallway was silent, except for the buzz and pop of florescent lights.

So at least some of K-science would be present, even if it was the terminally _dull_ half.  

 

* * *

 

The conference centre, like most places of the type built after 1965, looks like a series of glass and concrete boxes stacked by an unimaginative child, and the interior is no better. Noise reverberates off every hard surface, coming back tinny and harsh; with the hubbub from the waiting audience, the sound level is just below painful. Apart from the PPDC and UN logos on a blue backdrop, the stage is equally bare; just tables, chairs and the obligatory tangle of microphone wiring. From the point of view of the audience, the people on the stage must look very small indeed.

“I’ll never get used to these lights”, Dr Gottleib mutters, shielding his eyes.

“You’ll adjust eventually,” Raleigh says.

He shifts uncomfortably- they have been seated for 20 minutes as the lights are adjusted. “It’s a bit- staid, isn’t it? All this glass.”

“Tomorrow, they want to take pictures at the Peace Fountain in Ueno Park.” Mako says. “The blossom will be out. Very nice.”

“You know the Peace Fountain, Dr. Gottleib. A monument to Peace. It’s the appropriate symbol- sort of vaguely hopeful without really meaning anything.” 

Dr. Gottleib smiles wryly. “I do believe all this press intrusion has made you cynical, Mr. Becket.” “Hey, the cameras in the street? I can deal with. It’s when they start trying to photograph me in my pyjamas that I get antsy. Speaking of which-“

A wave of camera flashes greet the entrance of the second PPDC deputation arrives. The rangers arise to salute Hansen, before he wearily waves them down.

“Have we all got the party line down pat?”

They nod, at various levels of enthusiasm; the PR prep was almost as exhausting as the mission.

He is running a sergeant’s eye over all of them.

“No Geizler, Dr. Gottleib?”

“No sir. Medical were recommending he spend another few days in their care.”

“Probably for the best.” His eyes are on the press, on the UN panel. “How did he seem to you?”

“Oh, a little mithered perhaps- to be expected, of course. Quite tired.”

His eyes are on the crowd, now, the technical press, but he speaks down, and low. “Oh really? Seemed himself, did he?”

He is about to offer a bland pleasantry; it withers in Hansen’s gaze. He is giving him the careful appraisal that military types can, on occasion, muster.

“He… I didn't notice anything. And I was looking, I assure you. He just seems a little dazed and understandably stressed- as one might be, you know.”

(Hansen looks unconvinced- and _that_ is worrying. An emotional man would panic, and panic is easy to misdirect. Hansen is _considering,_ and probably considering his duty to a victorious but exhausted workforce; a world hungry for final, complete confirmation that, yes, the monsters are gone.)

He tries to be comforting. It's not his forte, he's aware of it, but he tries. “Sir, we can’t honestly predict the effects of… that drift. However, even based on a preliminary observation- even based on a _basic_ understanding of the drift and human or kaiju neurology, I- I can’t think you have anything to worry about.”

The steady murmur of the crowd is rising; the UN’s preliminary spokesman has risen to her feet. He makes a last attempt.

“He seems very much himself, sir.”

Hansen is squinting into the lights now; across the stage, camera flashes still outline Mako and Raleigh. Hansen smiles a smile with not very much humour in it.

“Almost what I'm worried, about really.”

He grimaces into the lights (it’s almost a smile) as he turns to the waiting crowd.     

 

* * *

 

He’s at least well enough to sit up and read.

Pleasingly, Mykonowski’s article on Raythe has just been published. The man had done some stellar work, considering he was so far inland; a really _interesting_ theory on the functioning of what passed for the peripheral nervous system of the kaiju.

He turned a page.

It was interesting, of course, purely from a sociological point of view- Xenobiology had, until 2013, been less than half-a-dozen articles a year, and the field had expanded too suddenly for a formal structure to be established. Kaiju analyses were always 10 pages in the back of Nature; for the novelty, more or less. As attacks had increased (more importantly, as samples had spread inland) the field had expanded, and expanded. As the war effort had began to falter, academic interest had paradoxically just gone up- research, after all, was cheaper than prevention, and it was always easier to find wild-eyed biologists from the fringier fields to invest their time.

And the other thing was-

He hit the references, and frowned.

Ah, no; it wasn't an especially short article; he had merely paged through without actually letting any information filter past his eyes.

Perhaps he was more tired than he thought.

He turned over, pummelling the pillow into submission.

Now the kaiju were gone, the pool was going to shrink even further, as researchers left the field.

Hmm.

“More for me,” he said aloud.

He slept, and dreamt of nerves like telephone cables; along them flashed nerve impulses that banged against the side of the cable as they travelled, like bottled lightning.

At least, until a few moments later.

That was when someone attempted to strangle him to death.


	4. Chapter 4

“So the thing is, guys; we have your EEGs here.”

“Wow, does not sound like you are the _happiest_ guy in the world to have our EEGs there.”

“Well, we’re having difficulty interpreting these.” Dr Nguyen rolls a shoulder; he’s middle-aged, but still sharp in the face, with a military haircut and a disconcertingly perceptive gaze. Rumour has it that he had recently invested in a condo in Central America. Rumour has it that said condo was about as far inland as one can go. _Apparently_ , he’s still smarting about that.   

“But you have been able to make some conclusions, Dr. Ngyuen. Given that it is, in fact, _your job_.” Hermann is sitting bolt upright; his eyes are narrowed to a slash.

(He can feel, in the back of his mind, what Hermann’s got going on right now; sure, consciously, he respects doctors, he trusts their expertise, but there were too many years of sitting in white-tile rooms, and the smell of disinfectant is driving him up the _wall_ so bad even Newt is getting the backlash, and he’s on edge like a spinning top.)  

(He’s not one to talk, of course. He sits on his hands.)

“Well- of course, the drift seems to have been the problem.”

“You made my brain sick. I knew it.” He nudges Hermann, which is like nudging a wicker basket- flexible, but only _just_. Nobody is in the mood even for weak jokes, apparently.

Probably for the best.

“…Not _as_ such, no. We’re fairly well acquainted with analysing the brainwaves of pilots- not that you two are true _pilots_ , of course-“ (Hermann’s back straightens again) “But there are some oddly consistent artefacts we’re seeing.”   

“You keep _saying_ that- ”

He shrugs. “You’re probably better qualified than me, Doctors. Take a look.”

Hermann’s is- well, “typical” is a difficult word to pin down, under the circumstances.

The usual blink and muscle artefacts; pretty bad blood response, but hey, fair enough under the circumstances.

Newton’s is a tangled mess. Red scribbled lines peak and fall like a bad road; the signals are too abrupt, to sharp, and around the theta wave the page is almost a red knot.

“God. Are you guys even _pulling_ a pattern out of this?”

“Mmm. At low granularity, of course. We’re going to have to run this a few more times. And we’d like to bring you both in for fMRIs sooner rather than later.” Nguyen folds the paper away neatly, back into its ream. “We might have a better idea if we could get a better picture of the incidents surrounding your drift. Your initial report mentions a malfunctioning drift machine, Dr. Gottlieb. That _might_ cause some of the interference we’re seeing here.” He picks up a pen; taps it once, twice on the desk. “Can you describe that machine to me?”

“The _machine_.” Says Newton. 

“Yes.”

“The _machine_?” he says, his voice rising to an uncomfortable pitch.

“Mmm. If you could just tell me where it is; or of you could tell some of our bridge specialists what the make or model was, we might be able to get some very brief ideas about possible cause. There are certain common faults, you know; especially on models left to neglect.”

He felt a bead of sweat begin to gather at the nape of his neck. It isn’t particularly warm in this room.

The answer, of course, was that the drift machine they had used was, indeed, probably the worst for wear when they used it; it probably wasn’t improved by being dragged to the middle of Hong Kong either; very few things improve in quality for being dragged to the middle of Hong Kong. It was a 1442 model, a _Callosum_ (or at least the _bones_ of a Callosum, after he was finished adjusting it); and it probably did indeed have, oh, possibly a few blown fuses. What it definitely had was a juvenile winged kaiju, impaled through the prefrontal lobe, attached to it, surrounded by a whole lot of rubble. And the headsets, of course, which would record the activation times, and the number of activations.

And there, precisely, was the problem.     

“I-“ he squeaked, “gosh, you- you know? It’s probably still in the jaeger bay.”

“Bay,” agreed Hermann.

(Dr. Nguyen had already heard the rumours; that much was obvious- and they did travel fast, in a microcosm like the Shatterdome.)

((And no-one needed to know the _truth_ ; not when some people were already sort of at a _disadvantage_ when it came to how they were perceived around here.)) 

“I could send a couple of porters down-“ said Dr. Nguyen.

“ ’S probably been pushed about- you know how it’s been around here, last few months. Busy.”

“Busy,” agreed Hermann.

“We’ll find it.” He says, standing up, skittering backwards, his hand going for the doorhandle. “Don’t you worry Doc. I’ll keep taking the pills you prescribed, I will do, the, we’ll do the _exercises,_ and you can rest assured, my friend, that the second we find that sucker, I will- _how does this goddamn thing work_ -“

Nguyen was rising now. “Dr. Geizler- with all due respect; as your physician, I'm not sure I can allow you to leave the ward. If your health is at risk-“

“Is his health compromised, Dr. Nguyen? How?” Hermann snapped. “I thought you made it perfectly clear that, bar the EEGs, we’re recovered as well as can be expected.”  

“Yes, but-“

“You’ve also made it perfectly clear that you need more information on our drift. Let us find it for you. In the meantime, of course,” he sniffs, “we’d like an independent observer.”

Nguyen watches him with a calculating gaze. (Newton groans internally, as he finally wrenches the door open; good job, Herms. If he wasn't suspicious before, he is _now_.) “It’s perfectly within your rights to request, of course.”

“Well, as you _quite rightly_ pointed out; you’re used to evaluating pilots, and we are _not_ pilots.” Hermann sidestep gracelessly to the door, following Newton. “If that _is_ all.” 

“Good evening, Dr. Gottleib.”

“Good day!”

He has to hurry, to catch up to Newton; happily, the path is relatively easy to guess.

The door of the lab goes ka- _bang_ when he pushes through; (the rotten thing is _spring-loaded_ in some inescapably awful way, and continually tries to take off his _arm_ whenever he enters at anything other than a gentle trot. He has to give the thing a shove to get through, which rather ruins the impact of his entrance as he turns to the silver table on the other side of the lab-)

Which is empty.

Oh. 

Newton, for a man so enamoured of innovation, is relatively easy to predict; it’s quite distressing not to find him where he expects the man to be. When put under duress, he returns to the lab, rather like a duck returns to the fledgling nest; there to sulk, think over his issue (the man thinks with his _hands_ , which is worse; there’ll be _pints_ of preservative over the floor before the day is over), and play his loud music.

Which is not like a duck, in that respect (the loud music aspect) but-

He turns at the hiss, and the click.

They keep an old kettle and a selection of the less-chipped mugs in the distant corner; he’s there now, his back to the door.

Oh.

His shoulders are peaked, drawn up behind his head. A defensive posture.

The mug says, “Grey Skies Are Gonna Clear Up!” There is also little picture of a cloud, which is smiling. 

That’s distressing in a way he can’t quite identify.

Newton turns.

“Oh- hey. Do you want tea?“

“I’m-“ He has to fall back onto his heel. “-fine. There’s no milk anyway.”

“Gotcha.”

He watches as Newton slowly crosses the floor.

He’s used to making predictions based on variables, and Newton has always been sort of reliably _un_ reliable; he was expecting to find the man spitting fire and shouting accusations about pseudoscience, not- whatever _this_ is.

“Of course-“ he begins.

And stops.

This new variable has him quite stumped.

“Of course, we’ll have to find something to tell Dr. Nguyen.” He manages eventually.

“Yeah. Sure.” His hand is knitted in the hair at the back of his head, the knuckles popped-white.

It would feel strange to cede to a weakness, even now; they’ve never been like that, always pushing at each other, nagging, the sharp edges of their personalities as a spur, or perhaps a diamond file; grinding, sharpening, honing to a matchless precision, even at the cost of a few hurt feelings, a few sleepless nights.

(Sleep.)

“It’s seven now, by the way,” he says; he doesn’t need to check his watch, but he does, just to shift his gaze away, nonchalant, from the small figure at the desk opposite him. “You’ll be up all night if you drink that.”

“Noted.”

He sips anyway. The little cloud grins at him. The slogan is printed in Cantonese on the other side, as well. He’s beginning to dislike it with an intensity far out of proportion to anything one should feel about a little grinning cloud printed on a mug, no matter how smug it looks.

It’s not something he’s good at; he’s never been easy, safe, _sound_ with social interaction. Newton hasn't either, though he masks it better, with chatter and dissimulation.

He un-purses his lips. It’s the brave thing to do, after all.

“Newton are you-“ he begins.

“In the morning, Hermann.”

Ah.

He draws his shoulders back, up.

“As you wish. I shall expect to see you at nine, then?” It’s not a question, exactly; he wishes it wasn’t a question.

And they have never been good at communication, either of them.

He leaves with the silence clanging behind him.

 

* * *

 

(Sleep is... difficult just at the minute.

 But it could be a number of things. I mean, he’s always had this inbuilt _aversion_ to falling asleep after hitting his head, or any other kind of brain trauma, and like, hello, that’s perfectly rational. That’s based on evidence, actually, that’s based on the time during degree number 3 when he’d abruptly realised that, hey, the drinking age in England is _way lower_ than at home, and had maaaaaaybe taken advantage of that a little too readily, and have you even heard this thing they have called ska? And then, of course, things _developed,_ and the whole night had ended (at least for him) with that cute pre-med supporting his neck up off the concrete and shouting at him to not fall asleep.

Man, degree number 3 was a _fun_ degree.  

And then of course there’s his own unique neurological settings, which, hmm, might have been set just a touch off from the get go. And the problem with medication, you know, is that it’s supposed to _control_ sleep, but they tell you on the packet to _already have_ a regular sleep pattern when you start? Like, what? Crowbar-inside-the-crate or what? And then if you don’t get enough sleep, the _mania_ sets off, and then you sleep less _again,_ and yadda yadda yadda and so on. Poisoned well, man.   

Which are two mildly interesting trains of thought, and which simultaneously (never say he’s not a multi-tasker) dance-around and serve-the-purpose-of-distracting-him-from the main point;

He doesn't want to sleep.

He doesn't want to sleep because of what might happen.

And, like, this might have started a few weeks ago, but it only came to a, a noticeable, recognizable _peak_ , a few days ago, when he’d woken up suddenly-

_Breathe-_

With a feeling like a hand clenched around his heart, and the vision of unnatural blue fading from in front of him.

And yeah, he’d been sleeping lightly, but that would be, like, natural, right? Because of trauma and stress and whatever.

But then-

It's fine. It's fine. In order to verify a finding you have to repeat the experiment, right? And it's not an intervention he ever wants to repeat again, but he has to. (He'll have to eventually-) That's the basis of the scientific hypothesis, that's Rigour 101, and maybe it's because he's cresting the wave of one of his stranger neurochemical tides, (in a long line of stranger neurochemicalneurochemical tides,) but it's just occurred to him how funny it is that the basis of scientific thinking in the rational West is doing the same thing and expecting different results. 

That's funny. 

Not funny-haha, right now, but still.

The litle steel-cased lamp over his head is uncomfortably hot. They're standard, in PPDC bunks, and have all those little design faults that are the hallmark of a thing designed by committee. 

They got the light right, though. A comforting yellowy-orange glow, bright enough to read but not bright enough to keep you awake.

Awake.

You can keep the lamp on for about two hours, he finds, before it becomes too hot to touch.

He lies, awake, and thinks; and does not dream. 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

“Well if it isn’t the boys from the backroom.”

Tendo Choi is unchanged, which is a blessing. Hermann sometimes says he may be fundamentally _unchangeable_ ; which he means as a compliment. Newt thinks of it mostly as a _relief_. Guy has always been a worker of small miracles; so small, and so miraculous, that no-one notices them, because they are what keep [ _kept_ ] the place running. Case in point, post-Pitfall; the man had literally not stopped moving for two days. Literally _not_. So the rumour went. Manning the bridge with a skeleton crew for an astonishing 18 hours, he had been everywhere- just counting live bodies, finding supplies. Efficient and cheerful and unfailingly co-operative, so the rumour went, up until hour 34; at which point someone had given him a gentle push into his chair, and he had been asleep before he hit the cushion.

The man accretes stories like this. It appears to be entirely involuntary.

Someone had finally gotten around to handing him Technical Commander status; well, like, thank _God_. He had essentially held the position for the past _year_ , more or less, with all the responsibilities but none of the paycheck. He carried the badge in his top pocket, claiming he didn’t have time to sew it on. He only intended to pull rank, he said, in order to cut ahead in the canteen.

“And even then, I probably won’t do it.” He sighs, elbows on the dividing desk of the lab. “I am too-damn-kind-hearted, that’s my problem.”

“But still; a momentous achievement.” Hermann says. And you can tell he means it; He’s leaning on his desk, both hands; face a little too forward (to save him from squinting; it’s what he does if he thinks you’re worth listening to. The focus is a little _disconcerting,_ if you’re not used to it; happily, Tendo is a veteran of the lab.)   

“For a boy from Brooklyn? Sure. Around here, however, I am still seen as a sort-of combination mail-boy and grease-monkey.” He taps at the pile of envelopes on the desk. “Pick up your damn letters, kids.”

Hermann’s thin fingers tap them square; an almost involuntary action.

“Certainly, Mr, Choi.”

“I wouldn’t mind, but the damn stuff tends to pile up.” He slides off the table, skipping neatly around an unmentionable pile that has been left in the middle of the floor. It’s not a biohazard, for the first time in a long time, but a pile of assignation forms; paperwork is becoming an issue. “As you know. You guys must be getting ready, right? Auditing?”

“Audit?” For want of more focus, he’s been toying with seawater samples from the bay; mostly, this is taking the form of tipping them over his notation pad every time he reaches for a goddamn pen.  

“So I heard. You weren’t at the conference, were you Newt?”

He accretes stories in this way too. If gossip is the lifeblood of the PPDC, Choi is whatever equivalent the Shatterdome has to a heart. 

“Nah. Held back. Medical.”

“Really?”

(It’s the weirdest thing- Tendo’s eyes flicker to the left-hand side of the room, just a for a second. It’s just Hermann over there, fiddling with envelopes.) 

“You know the fuss they make over little things.”

(His eyes slide back.) “Well, you would know, my man. What was it the time before last- acid burns?”

He waves a hand expansively. “Pfft- hardly even _acid_ , hardly even _burns._ You puncture a single kaiju gall bladder over yourself and suddenly, _everybody’s_ got a-“

“ _Newton_.”

“What?”

“Well, aren’t you two lucky I make friends easily.” Choi says. “Lot of interest in this place, according to a _very_ kind lady I met at the conference pre-amble.”

Gottleib has gone quite still.  
"Who?"  
"The million-dollar question. Literally. Someone with a solid interest in big giant robots, and enough cash to fulfill said whim.” Tendo says this with the easy tenor of a man who has never had to go through the _unholy hell_ of an international research funding application before. “And _everyone’s_ interested in the jaegers, now that the footage of Pitfall has gotten out.”

“Impossible.” Hermann’s tip-tapping at the letters now, though they were in order a few seconds; “No-one’s got the money, these days.”

“ _Investment_ was the word I heard thrown around. “Preserving research momentum” and all that 7/4 time jazz. Some private firms have taken an interest, but I’d say they’ll be turned down flat. Hansen and co. like the jaegers a little too much to _sell_ them.”

The steady, shiny _ching_ that accompanies Choi wherever he walks is the bundle of keys he keeps hooked to his belt. Stories abound here, too; nobody knows what they all go, exactly; nobody knows what they all keep locked. The only one who knows is Choi himself; and even he (to quote the man) cannot know, one hundred percent of the time; and what he does know, he cannot comment.  
“Names, names.”

“Guess. I tell you only what my friend told me, of course, but the UN are looking pretty likely.”

“Ha. We thought _that_ back in 2017.”Harmann says darkly.

“Yes, but you have a _big_ hunting trophy hanging over your mantelpiece now. Maybe literally in your case Newt.”

He’s looking at the big ventricle section, which has not yet been sent off to a safer place, or some other deserving research facility. Well, _yeah_. It’s got sentimental value.

“Shine your shoes, gentlemen; the world wants to know what you’re up to, these days.” He checks his watch. “But it’s all rumour now, of course. Aaaaand I gotta run. Come up to the decks sometimes, will you, Newt? The kids miss you.”

“Thanks, Tendo.” 

“Hey. _Oberleutnant_ Technical Commander Choi to _you_ , Geizler.”

Tendo exits, his ring of keys dangling jauntily from one hooked forefinger.

"Cool, new funding. Maybe won't have to go job hunting after all, eh, Herms?"

It’s almost a certainty that one of the letters he’s holding is from MIT. Hermann, of course, had snorted derisively; due to an unspecified but vicious fight that apparently made academic hairs curl back in the day, Hermann had summarily dismissed MIT and a few of the sister universities as “American _nonsense_ ”; (it was his particular way with language that made “American” sound like as much of an insult as “nonsense”). However, they were being persistent. He’s had a few emails of his own, from old colleagues; everybody wants to talk to the men who beat the monsters. It’s probably as close as he’ll come to being a rock star, which is discouraging.  

The whole thing has slipped out from under his mind, however. He’s had other things on his mind.  
“ _I’ve had other things on my mind_.”

Hermann scuttles around his desk and throws himself, bodily, at the door; he lands ugly, but the bolt clicks in the lock.

“To put it mildly.”

He tends to bow over when moving quickly; now, he’s at a 100-degree angle.

“Alright, Dr. Geizler, time to put that allegedly-magnificent brain to _use_ ,” he growls.

“First of all, “allegedly” is _such_ a-“

“ _What do we tell Nguyen_?”

And by extension, the rest of the ‘Dome hierarchy, is what he means. So far, all the fallout from Pitfall has been focused, naturally, on the One Big Win, which is to say; all the monsters, dead. The world has been so grateful that no-ne has thought to question _how_ exactly it happened. Reports to this point have been informal; Hermann had turned in a page of hurried bumf which sort of artfully says everything and nothing; and everyone working live on the night of Pitfall and in the know has been keeping quiet, at least until the dust settles.  So far, the only thing the rumour mill has had had been scraps and misinformation. 

(Besides, there are- _other_ things.)

“Well, don’t we just hand this over to Hansen? That walking implement of the military-industrial complex has got to be good for _something_.”

“ _Newton._ You can _afford_ to show more respect.”

“He’s Marshal, isn’t he? Marshalls make problems go away. They make the _absence_ of problems. Or, you know, they make, like a _ton_ more, but that seems to be largely dependant on mood-”

“Newton-“

“As far as I can tell. He is Marshall, isn’t he? He was certainly shouting a lot the last time I saw him.”

“Newt-“

“He stopped me drinking after the breach closure; that seems like the kind of kill-joy behaviour Marshals are known for.”

“Newt-“

“It’s _Marshallian,_ is what I mean.”

“Newt! _Listen_. He- stepped down.”

“What?”

“Or, rather, he never stepped up, if I understand it correctly. Not officially.”

Hermann steps carefully around his desk

 “He took on the role of Marshall during the operation, certainly. _In extremis_ , and I think you can agree the situation was pretty _extremis_ at that point. However, he stepped down immediately after.”

“What? Why?”

“Newton, he’s just lost a son, for god’s sake. He’d just broken an arm. For the good of his mental and physical health, they asked him to step down.”

“Who’s they?”

“Good lord. You never really _cared_ who funded your research, did you?”

“Nope.” He admits. Cheerfully. _Deliberately_ cheerfully.  

“Also-“ he shifts uncomfortably. “Well. I don’t believe it was entirely voluntary, if you understand me. You know the officiating board was never exactly happy with the idea of having a pilot as a commanding officer. Heaven forfend we should have an officer with a _trade_.” He says, upper lip curling, barely perceptibly, into a snarl. “Pentecost was _just_ acceptable, given that he had retired.”

“Really? Because he looked pretty un-retired the last time I saw him. I could tell by the way he was in the _giant robot_.” 

“Don’t speak ill of the dead, Newton.” This emerges a little too sharp, too sudden; Newt feels the other man’s hackles begin to raise.

“I’m- sorry. Actually.” He untenses, letting his spine sag. “I know you- you really liked him.”

“I respected him. I would respect anyone with such dedication to their job. And he was, after all, my commanding officer.”

He’s not prepared to have the “your-expertise-while-extensive-does-not-equal-rank” argument again. Not with the grey cloud of their collective loss hanging in the air.       

“And I believe he was _unofficially_ retired. But- well. We all took some desperate actions towards the end there.”

He shifts his cane from hand to hand; his eyes are fixed resolutely on the ground.

And this is-

They’ve never exactly _talked_ about this. About how exactly, not to put too fine a point on it, they mashed their brains together and saw whatever-two-rational-people-can-have-that-is-the-equivalent-of-a-soul. Their connectomes, possibly; though that lacks poetry. 

It’s not something they have time to discuss, anyway. He turns his attention back to the topic at hand.

(…And certainly, like, what he would like, just at the minute, is _definition_.  Because the Drift, for all it’s utility, does not lend itself to definition. And, as scientists, that is what they like best. Or so he thinks. And when you find out that your colleague of ten years connects you, with, for example, _black-blue-sheen_ and _don’t-laugh-he’ll-think-he’s-amusing_ , and, for some inexplicable reason, the smell of hot coffee but the _taste_ of salt, what are you supposed to do with that information?

It’s simultaneously too much and not enough.

He doesn’t know whether to _push_ , for _more_ information, or pull, pull away like he _always_ does, (except he doesn’t, that’s _Hermann’s_ thinking-)

((I think fondly of the smell of glutaraldehyde now and that’s _your_ fault-)))

But he’s turning his attention back to the topic at hand.

“There’s gotta be a functioning hospital in the area, right? We can scrape together enough Cantonese to make _that_ happen.”

The heat never seems to _effect_ Hermann; nevertheless, his skin looks waxy now. “It will have to do.” He shakes his head as he shuffles around the dissecting table. “God help us, black-market _neuroscience_. I never thought I’d see the day.” Of course. Like a _homing bullet_ , he’s going for the kettle.

He shakes himself out of the reverie. “-Right. But- but I suppose we’re two of the lucky ones, right? You heard the doctor. The _excuse_ for a doctor. What _passes_ for a doctor.  I mean, alive and all.”

He _doesn’t_ say “alive _and well_.” He doesn’t.

(Perhaps he picks up on it. They haven’t experienced any of the official symptoms of what the pilots call a “wave”- that faint, benign blossom of another consciousness, live, inside your own. Sasha once described it as “like a headache, but without pain.” But- well. Stranger things have happened.)

A mug lands in front of his hand.

“We have a report to write,” says Dr Gottlieb.

* * *

**Six Months Later [Three Weeks Before Operation Aurora]**

 

The wind is coming in chill off the waterfront. 

It is an act of mockery, almost; the ragged band of people, survivors, standing along the shoreline in front of Jaeger bay 2. It's like teasing. You didn't get _us_ , in the end.

No-one is quite in the mood to acknowledge this good fortune, though. 

They had thrown flowers, whoever cared to; some incense had been burned. The various churches that the Dome hosted had already taken care of the prayers weeks ago. Ms Mori had read a poem, that was nice. Now it was left to Hansen to send off whatever remained, those presences, unspoken, hanging in the air.

"Marshall Pentecost said to me-"

He pauses.

"Well, I can't repeat what he said to me. This was around the time of the, ah, wall. Tempers were- heated. Can't repeat what he said to me, not in mixed company.” He takes a long breath.

“But he was a bit of a history buff, you see. And he said to me, you remember Churchill? You know “Never have, so many-” you know, I never wrote this down. Sorry. Never wrote this down, at the time, because I never thought I’d have to, ah, remember it.”

“Anyway, he said to me, “the thing people forget is that London was getting the sh- the hell bombed out of it when he made that speech. Churchill was massively canny when it came to propaganda, and that speech- it was a little glamour. A glamour to cover up the death and destruction that was happening, every day. Soften it down a bit.”

“And he said it got on his nerves, because the bit that people remember doesn’t even talk about the pilots; and that’s what the speech is _supposed_ to be about. It’s about the debt of gratitude the populace owed them.”   

He rubs at his knuckle; his hands are broad, and they look broader with nothing in them; his hands are suited to a tool, an instrument. He is an active force; it must be strange to be slow; to make himself slow, like this.

“I’ve been a pilot. A lot of people I knew were pilots. I-“

He drops his head.

“Sorry. Sorry. ‘M not good with words. Sorry.”

 Behind him, Ms Mori’s head drops forward; if you watch for it, you can see the tilt of sandy hair in the front row. That is Mr. Becket’s head, turning up. One sees it sometimes, with the pilots- this _duality-_ as though they are connected, in parallax, by some impossibly fine thread.

(There is something inescapably _romantic_ about the pilots’ post-drift connections (though it’s not something he would ever admit to outside the privacy of his own head.) And it is “romantic” in the old sense of the word- “like a romance”; a story, or a legend. One would hear these fantastic stories working here; the mother-daughter pair, (Valour Monolith, it must have been), where the mother coaxed her daughter through her birth pangs, somehow, via the wave and flow of the drift. The Brazilian pilots- the follow pilot had, after 20, 25 neural handshakes, woken with an inexplicable aptitude for the clarinet, which his lead pilot played. The Ecuadorians- lovers who died, within minutes of each other, separated by a continent.)

Former Marshall Hansen sighs deeply, getting his breath back.

“So. Everybody here has a lot to be sore about. We’ve all lost a lot. Everybody has. But all of us- all of us here- we have a lot to be thankful for. Alive, there’s one. All alive. And- well. It’s- ah. A debt of gratitude.”

He pauses, eyes on the horizon.

“When people ask you about what it was like here, in the day, just- just remember that. They owed us nothing, and they gave us everything.”

The wind soughs; they are too far from the mouth of the harbour to taste salt from the sea, but still, inexplicably, it hangs; alive in the air.

 “But.

“I _been_ a pilot. And I can’t think of anything worse than somebody making a fuss, after all this time. God knows the Marshall always said-”

“Well.  Anyway.

The best we can do to pay them back is to live. I suppose.” 

He raises his eyes from considering the back of his hands; seems to notice the other Shatterdome staff, for the first time in perhaps five minutes.

“And that’s what I have to say on the matter, right?”

The audience, collectively, exhales.

**

He gets ten seconds of peace _exactly_.

“Of course you would manage to be _late_ ,” Hermann hisses, shuffling over, crab-wise, through the crowd; exactly like an over-large hermit crab.

“Ten minutes. And I was _not_ the last one in, did you see-”

“ _Regardless_.” 

Hermann takes his arm as they walk back; the ground is rocky here, after all. 

“Have you _looked_ at your emails.”

It’s a statement, not a question.

“Since yesterday? No.”

“Since- my god, you will be the _death_ of me. You’re due a fitting, apparently.”

It has been less than a year, but the wind tastes cleaner. Ecologically speaking, that is no time at all; and (despite their best efforts) Aurora (or _Eva_ ) has a carbon footprint that can be seen from space; but the air tastes clean; cold, and clean, and with germination in it.

He tears himself away from this thought, in case it carries.

“Mako seemed to think _you_ were the problem, Hermann. Apparently _you_ need to weigh on the relays before they can continue fabrication.”

Hermann deflates as the memory creeps back in.

“My god, you’re right. Do you know, it completely slipped my mind.” Hermann stretches, back, _back_ ; the physiotherapist (despites how much he complains) is a miracle worker.  “Too much work.”

“Would you be anywhere else?”

“…No. than doing research into this? No. I don’t think I would.”

Grass has started to grow again, on this side of the dome; it hisses.

A memory, unbidden; he nudges the shape on his left.

“But I sent that email to Stanford.”

“Mmm.”

“ _Despite_ the paycheck.”   

“Come now. You wouldn’t take away my sounding board, would you?”

“Uh, excuse me? You’re _my_ sounding board, pal, not the other way around. I don’t even follow half of the crazy-abstract, express-a-cherry-blossom-in-primes, _formal-number-theory_ -loving-“

“Oh, there’s a first. _Die wunderkind_ Newton Geizler admits that there is a topic he doesn’t completely understand immediately upon seeing it. When was the last time that happened, kindergarten?”     

Hermann leans a little harder on his arm. The path here is uneven, after all.

 

* * *

 

**But; Six Months Ago**

 

He doesn't want to sleep.

He doesn't want to sleep because of what might happen.

Everything in him that is rational tells him that this is ridiculous. Absurd. If he wasn’t himself-

(His mind recoils from that thought, and he cringles, internally-)

If he were a _third party_ , an _independent observer_ ; to phrase that a little better; if he were standing at his own bedside (and he’d done a few rounds; degree number 6 was neurological, and had involved a few turnarounds in a neurorehabilitation centre, as a sort of walking exponent of the MMSE) he’d be prepared to call anxiety, or PTSD. It’s justified, dammit, given the past few weeks. A job for the psychiatrists. Sign off. Done. Hell, he’d be prepared to dismiss this as sleep apnoea, if he’d seen the way he reached forward, hands out, fingers crooked; like a talon-

[ _blue-]_

_Because-_

He’d woken up drenched in sweat, with the feeling, (fading) of being a huge, uncategorisable _thing;_ and- it was impossible to describe, outside of the dream state, but- with the feeling that his head was connected to- was _part_ of a keening, scraping whining overmind that nagged at the edges of his vision and hearing and a few senses that he wasn’t sure he even _had_ , and above all of it the rage-

The rage of _denial_ - 

The arrogance of _humans_ - 

And he’d had to get up out of bed and walk around for a while, until the shaking stopped.

Because, like, how is this a question you bring to your doctor?

How do you stride into your doctor’s office and say something like “oh yeah doc, I’m eating well, that weird rash is clearing up, oh, and by the way, I might have an alien monster attempting to control my thoughts?”

This is not something he can bring to Dr. Nguyen. There is a high probability that an aspirin won’t fix this.

Is this a question that should go up the ranks? Like, just in case this is some kind of-

Well, it’s stupid to even think it, the Breach is closed, thank god, knock wood, but-

But it’s not like Hansen can hear about this, can’t do anything, but he also can’t _hear_ about it, because- like, scientists get a bad enough rap as it is, right? And, like, even within the highly specialised environment of the Shatterdome, his particular obsession is tolerated rather than welcomed. And with the tattoos and everything. You know. He doesn’t want to be thought of as _that_ scientist. _That’s_ a pop-cultural trope gone bad.

Actually, maybe that’s an idea. You know, play into it. Stride into the middle of the mess-hall one day, strike a pose and say, like “Gentlemen; a second breach has opened; and I fear the location may be _inside my own head_ ,” and then lightning would crash, and thunder would roll off in the distance and-

He jumps a little at the knock on the door; he suspected it might have been the thunder arriving early.

“Ah, Pop-Cultural Trope, Second Declension.” He says, opening the door.

“What?” says Hermann.

“Nothing. Just thinking to myself.”  

“So I gathered. Has something happened?”

“Oh. Could you...?” He tries to lean on the doorframe and almost misses it; faux-casual has never been his thing, really. “Sorry, was I _thinking_ super loud?”

“I got... something. Of course I don’t mean to intrude, but-” 

He replies a little too fast maybe, and a little too loud; “Me? Oh, I’m fine. Sleeping, medication, you know, ups and downs, I got the, the hospital thing to worry about, must be concentrating a little too hard, you know looping it around the old, uh, phonological, uh, sketchpad.”

Hermann does not look convinced. He is about to speak, so-

“And I mean, _sorry_ , about my, you know, _thinking super loud_ , some of us work best at night, I dunno about you, and I mean look at you anyway! Up at this hour. I must be rubbing off on you, at last, what’s got you up night owl?”       

Hermann, for all his fine qualities, has never been good at dealing with this level of volubility this late at night. He grimaces slightly at the noise before he digs a palm into his forehead. “Oh, just- as I say. Heard something. Leg, as usual.”

“Oh, good! Well not “good” obviously, but-“

 “And I can see you’re your usual effervescent self. Very well then.”

He turns, one-two one-two, on his bad leg, and Newt is silently rejoicing when-

“And I mean-“

He turns back.

“You would tell me if you were having any- nightmares or somesuch, wouldn’t you?”

Scuppered. Jig’s up.

They’re going to put you in a _tube_. 

“Hey,” he says weakly, “if they happen, you’ll be the first to know.”

He has time to see Hermann’s face before he slams the door.

It looked like he was...

 Processing.

 


	6. Chapter 6

They have found a place, finally, that will not let reporters in. It took a lot of work, and the kind of hustle and bustle that normally creates a lot of noise; and Mako suspects that the PPDC have (as a courtesy) mufled away a lot of that noise, using an awful lot of money as the cushion. Nevertheless, she is grateful. It's quiet, 17 stories off the floor of the Hong Kong city; she can get some work done.  

A little wire-frame model spins and kicks, spins and kicks. It glows green.

“<You’ve put your head waggle in there.>” Says Raleigh.

“<Excuse me, my head does not> “waggle”.” says Mako.

“<I’m not surprised you can’t see it, what with your head waggling around so much.>”

She swats at him as he leans down.

He is smarter than he thinks, she knows that; she has felt, in parallax, the sharp spark and _speed_ of his thoughts; but he still treats her programming like something incredible, or even amazing for its existence. The reification of an idea; or, (as he says) it’s amazing to see it all up there.

“<I liked playing with dolls as a child.>” She says; her voice has a smile in it now, as she can see his face. He is still stunned, and she can never fail to find it extraordinary.  “<You should try it sometime.>”

“<I’ll be happier when I’m piloting it.>”

“Ha!”

“<That sounded bitter.>”

“Well,” she gestured at the little mannequin, “<this is just my doll. They will never let us build a fighter again.>”

“<They’ll certainly never let you build a fighter that does Hatsumono-style _spin kicks_. >”

“<No,>” she says thoughtfully.

He’s cooking something; the clean smell of lean meat grilling. After drifting with him, she had begun to crave meat, cooked this way, the way he cooks it.

“<I may have the upper hand with language, but you have control of the stomach, I think.>”

He chuckles, and she feels the little spike of joy. They  have spent very little time apart, and the connection has not had the time or the distance to fade; in fact, it had gotten stronger, and Raleigh feels a lot of joy. She would never again have expected to feel that it is okay to feel such effortless joy.

Joy shared across the drift is like the old ideogram や, _Yū_ , which her father once pointed out to her, written on a banner outside a celebrating household; joy multiplied so as to become meaningless, effortless; yes. Time In his company is effortless.

She rises.                              

“<Aren’t you staying?>” He has taken to carrying a dishcloth draped across his shoulder in the kitchen; he cooks with a fierce concentration, like someone defusing a bomb. She asked him why, once; he shrugged, and said that it has been a long time since he has had a chance to be fussy, and fierce, and invest time in small, useless things. 

(And he still thinks himself not very bright, she had thought to herself at the time. Mad.) 

“<You are sweet. And very helpful. And an excellent cook. But I must go and see Uncle.>”

He chuckles again.

Effortless.

 

* * *

  

“-and what's worse than that is that you’ve let things _mould_ in here.”

Honestly, the things _some_ people get upset by. “Oh, cool your jets, Hermann, it’s plain agar.”

“If it’s _plain_ agar, why is it growing something?”

The paper that he wants is on top of a stack of books, which is in turn on top of a stack of box folders, which is in turn on top of a pot which possibly contains a spider fern. Or possibly _used to_ contain a spider fern, given that he never got the hang of caring for plants. He is contemplating using an old computer monitor as a stepping-stone as he mutters “Come on Herms, have you never wanted a pet?”

“ _You’re_ here. Newton, I don’t want anything else that’s loud and scruffy and constantly needs attention.”

“Hey! Hey. _Wants_ , not “needs _”_. Remember that.” he finishes. The paper is irretreivable, he has decided. “Hermann. Hermann? Are you remembering that? Herms-?“

Hermann has turned away.

He lets his gaze fall on the desk. The top of the petri dish is lost somewhere in a wash of paper; a lot of unappealing work he is in the process of ignoring. Allegedly, he is in the process of signing off a bunch of tissue samples, but it’s difficult to get the pen moving. Apart from being terminally _boring_ , it’s tugging his heart strings a little bit. Yes, they’re big slices of monsters, but a guy can get attached, you know?

His eyes fall on the dish. Probably just dust. But still, growing.

“Good for you, buddy”, he mutters.

(Growing.)

“Pardon?”

The door opens.

“Gentlemen.”

“Marshall Hansen.”

(The “Marshall” still sits uneasily on the tongue; after the final, blessed breach closure, Hermann thinks; the nature of the chain of command had suffered a brief organizational wobble. There was work to be done, still, no-one had doubted it; but Hansen had stepped into the role with a vast grief hanging over his shoulders. No-one could doubt his ability, but still. Everyone who talked to him knew; celebration was muted wherever he went. There could be no lonelier role than the one in power.

“I wonder if you two are busy at all?”

“Awfully.”

“Completely booked,” agrees Newton.

“Hmm. Back in the day, you wouldn’t even have time to speak,” he says, pivoting around a trolley loaded over with folders marked OLD and EVEN OLDER and WHERE DID WE GET THIS. “Just down to see what you’re up to. You’ve probably heard we’re due an inspection soon.”

“ _Sir_. You shock and surprise us.” He does seem to be determined to be a nuisance today.

“They’re talking about putting more money into inspecting the site of the former breach,” says Hansen wearily, eyeing the back of Newton’s head, where he has turned to fetch something down off a teetering pile of books. “Something about radioactivity. Xenogenic pollution, you know.”

“Funny, we were just thinking about that, weren’t we Doctor Geizler?”

“ _Were_ we?” says the back of his head. 

He grits his teeth. 

“About the _alpha particles_.” He turned to Hansen. “The western pylon is entirely inadequate for monitoring the former breach site, as you know-“

“Oh, _that_. Quiet Hermann, you tell it wrong; they never laugh.” He juked around his desk with unseemly haste. “What he means is that it was _okay_ while the jaegers were still able to get out; we could gather broad-scale impact data- gamma radiation, acidity- from the on-board sensors, more or less, but that was always a stop-gap solution. If you’re talking about _environmental_ impact, we’d want something a lot more detailed; probably a Mueller grid type thing, with gradations radiating outwards from the central rift.”

Hermann nods. “As well as that, the final confrontation disturbed the sea bed for about 500 kilometres around the rift, which _severely_ disturbs the territory models the pilots were working with-“

“- _and_ kicked up a bunch of silt and non-habitation detritus, which means some of the old sensors are choked.” Newt says, his right hand moves across the desk, entirely outside it’s owners control; it picks up a pen. He draws a sheet of paper towards himself. He draws a block, in fat black lines; the western pylon. The top two-thirds he marks with a messy black scribble; the universal sign for nada, nix, useless. “At the _minute_ we’re still getting sub 50m readings, thank _god_ ; but either the silt is still settling- unlikely- or the receiving diodes have gone dark from lack of contact. Now, _thankfully_ , The Tokyo Green Accord people have shared some of their data with us; _some_. But hey, we were there first-“

“And besides, it would be a shame to disregard the pylon system, when it’s the closest established monitoring network to the rift.”

“Oh yeah, sure, the _infrastructure’s_ still there. But it needs updating, _bad_.” He draws a little sad face near the black dots that indicate the flow probes. Hansen looks at it, and he hastily covers it with a thumb. They are _professionals_ , after all. 

Hansen shakes his head, like a man who’s just given the old shine-and-polish by a used car salesman.

“Doctor Geizler, do you think you could say that all again, to a funding committee?”

“Me? Oh yeah, sure.” (He looks around at the ominous pile of his IN tray.) “It’ll be a wrench, but I can tear myself away. For a day.”

“It would be soon, mind.” Hansen carries his right elbow a little stiffly; he leans on the old sink now, and winces when his arm settles.

“I assure you, Marshall Hansen, we’d be more than capable. If we though we could be any use for the bid- I mean-“

Hansen raised a single eyebrow.

“That’s a dirty word, strictly, Dr Gottleib.”

“Of course I mean-“

“No. no, don’t tell me who told you. I’d probably have to discipline them; and I hate doing that.” He sighed, deep and heartfelt. “I always prefer to be on the receiving end of a righteous bollocking, truth be told; it usually means you’re onto something.”

(“Amen,” Newton mutters from across the lab. Hansen glances at him- )

“And I mean, ah, of course, we only want to make things easier, for the, ah, _transition_.” Hermann says, loudly. “Well, naturally I personally would  like to do some more reading, but of course we’d be more than happy certainly to advise.”

Hansen shakes himself.

“Good. To be honest, I think they were hoping you’d say that. They’ve already been sniffing around for Mori as well- I think they’re looking for the matched set.”

“Oh yes?”

“Oh yeah. It’ll be a regular Shatterdome reunion.” 

And that, perhaps is too much; Newton has the good sense to duck his head and look away at the old man lowers his head, however briefly.

(Too many lost, is the banner they hang over their heads. And never again, if we can help it.)

“Cheers then, fellas. You’ll probably get an email by Friday. If I don’t send it round, call Alastair-“

Hansen turns to leave; his boot hits the trolley, and a folder (distressingly, labelled only “???”), slides to the floor, and scatters paper like a butterfly bomb.

“Ah, bugger it-“

Hermann scurries around the desk.

“Newton, you _will_ have to clean this-“

A hand lands on his arm as he prepares himself to stoop for the papers.

“Don’t trouble yourself, Dr Gottleib. Matter of fact, could you walk me out? I never learned my way around this part of the ‘dome.”

“Oh, certainly. We can get out to quadrangle from here quite easily. Just this way-”

(As the door slams, he hears the muffled crumple of a heavy pile of books collapsing. Well, strictly, a pile of books, box folders, and a spider fern in a pseudoschroedingerian state of life and un-life. He winces, but Hansen doesn't seem to have noticed.)

(It would be quite easy to get lost in this part of the dome. Even before researchers began leaving early in the war, leaving half-open doors and lone office chairs pushed into odd office rooms; it was composed of crumpled corridors squashed into the space behind the main Jaeger testing dome. Where the two buildings melted together, there was an odd grey granite square; it was referred to as "the quadrangle" purely because of the lack of a less grand name.) 

Hansen slowed. To the casual observer, he would look like someone merely lost in thought.

“He’s still alright, is he?” Hansen says, in an undertone. 

“Sir, I’m honestly not sure what you’re expecting. He’s _fine_. He’s a little scatterbrained, but then he always _was_.”

“ _Noticeably_ so?”

Hansen is giving him what can only be described as a penetrating look. He’s damned perceptive when he wants to be.

“Sir…”

He shifts his cane from hand to hand. It’s probably treason to lie to a commanding officer.

“ _I’ve_ noticed. But-”

“But then you’ve worked with him longer than anybody else.”  

“Yes, sir,” he says, with relief. “He’s taking a little longer to recover than others, I think, but that’s a problem for him, rather than anybody else. And if you _could_ look into getting an external neural specialist in-“

“Oh, believe me, I’m trying.” He says gloomily. “Stacker was always better at this bureaucracy stuff than me. It’s all about getting what you want without ever saying that you want it, if you take me.”

“Mmm.”

Grief has hollowed his cheeks, and the pressure of command has greyed his temples; Marshall Hansen has never looked baby-faced, but now he looms, rather than stands, during meetings; his hands curl with actions he can no longer take.

“I can certainly keep Medical off your back for a while. Though I wonder if that might not do more harm than good.”

He stops; leans on a wall. They face out to the grey water of the bay.

“And how about yourself? Keeping well?”

“Mmm. Coping. Keeping busy helps.”

“Good. That’s good.” He shifts his weight, left to right foot.

A strange thing, then; Hansen looks away, across the water; if he wasn’t sure it was impossible, he’d swear the Marshall was _embarrassed_. 

“Of course,” the Marshall says, apparently to a distant seagull, “I have to thank you for, ah keeping a- It’s strictly- you have to tread a fine line with personnel-type stuff, Doctor Gottleib, but- I’m glad you feel you can tell me these things.”

“Oh, nonsense. I consider it part of my duty,” he says, in what he likes to imagine is a brisk, workman-like tone.

“Yes, but even then- I mean, I thought it was awkward to tell off my Chuck, sometimes, but it must be even worse with- ah- you two.”

“Sir?” this is less brisk.

The Marshell stands up. “I’m not asking, mind you,” he says quickly, “But thanks anyway.”

He's honestly bewildered. “ _Sir_?” 

“Well, you know. You work together, as well. And of course, you-“ he glances absently over his shoulder, though the quadrangle is clear in all four directions- “never mind our- ah- _friend_. You two drifted together, of course. You not getting any feedback from that? Any waves, or anything?”

“Oh, _that_. No. I think I lack sensitivity, truth be told,” 

“Ah. That’s good. Shouldn’t keep you up, then.”

They are walking in the direction of the water; a gull cries, somewhere in the distance.  

“My arm aches, sometimes. And I wonder.”

It must be showing on his face, because Hansen grimaces at him; a brief admission of embarrassment as his own foolishness, his sentimentality. 

“Nah, nah, nah, I been to see all the psychologists and the head-shrinkers and that. I’m- ugh- I’m _working on it_ , as they say. I’m not as mad as some, anyway. But sometimes, when the wind blows in-“   

He contemplates his hand; it is weathered beyond the limits of day-to day; some black substance has been ground into the rough edge of the thumb. Herc curls his hand now,  perhaps consciously, perhaps not; he loosely clenches his fist- “ah. There it is. When the wind comes in-“

He pauses.

“Well, it’d be just the kind of thing Chuck’d do, you know.“

Flex, uncurl. Pause.

“Just to remind me he was still here.” 

Hermann remains silent. The drift, after all, has more possibilities than any of them have contemplated; and besides, he does not want to confirm an untruth- nor in doing so, extinguish a fond hope. 

Hansen pulls his eyes back from the horizon. 

"Still-" He straightens up; as they turn towards the entrance of the main Dome offices, picking up an invisible burden. He even attempts a smile, a weak effort someone must have told him was Appropriate for Commanders Speaking to Staff and Good for Morale. "The UN guys will want to carry out their own evaluations for any future staff being inducted into the future monitoring plans. It's be nice to have a clean ticket again, yes? Nice to have it down on paper." 

Hermann had not realised, until then, that he had adopted his own grimace; the general-purpose talking-to-superior-officers look of vague assent. He know this, because he feels it freeze. 

"Oh, yes. Of course. Very reassuring." He croaks.

(...)

    

* * *

 

In the lab, oblivious to the world, Newt draws on.

It’s a terrible thing to even say, but; what if the breach were to re-open?

(It’s the words nobody wants to say; and it’s the only reason why everybody would want to keep such a close and careful eye on the rift. This is not just for shiny, squeaky-clean scientific curiosity; this is pure gritted-teeth guardianship. Surely everybody gets that, right? That's what they're all dancing around. Newt, personally, doesn't get it. The point of science in that you go _towards_ the unknown; and the unknown is usually the most frightening part of any scenario.)  

He always used to sketch when speculating; a terrible habit, but conducive to fleshing out a proposal. His second year notes from Harvard, he recalls, were thick with doodles, almost black along the margins; that had been when he was planning a tattoo based on the Clash, but “HEART ATTACK MACHINE” is a really difficult phrase to kern, at least in a way that would fit across the shoulderblades-

His hand is moving more smoothly now; he idly sketches out a series of straight lines, all intersecting at a point; like an abstract clockface. It’s soothing, really.

He returns to the subject at hand; what would happen if the Breach were to re-open?

Well, for a start, based on what Hermann has been saying, the Breach produces a superabundance of alpha particles, consistant with atomic decay, so undoubtedly radioactive emissions would go up; that would be bad news (on top of the fact that the kaiju would be free again), because while the Pacific ocean can absorb a lot of damage pollution-wise, a second-opening would definetly tip the balance. And then of course, you have to think about the effects of Kaiju blue; which is closer to his own area of expertise. Now if the kaiju were free again, you’d be seeing much more widespread areas of contamination, depending on how far inland they got this time. Because if the jaegers were gone, (and the kaiju would be free again) and humans stopped-     

He looks at what he’s drawn. Huh. Interesting. His idle doodling session has produced an intricate wave-like patterns that curves out from the centre. Not his usual style, but it might make a nice tattoo.

Now, if the kaiju were free again-

(The door of the lab ka-bangs against the wall- that’s Hermann. The guy moves like a bull elephant with a stone in his loafer, and apparently has never gotten the hang of the spring-loaded door, which Newt knows for a fact he secretly, _passionately_ resents, as much as one can hate an inanimate object. (To his own amusement, he knows there is a divot in the wall behind the door where the handle has repeatedly met the breeze-block wall.)

And he knows that, after a long-ass, unplanned, unaccounted meeting with a superior officer like that, Hermann will go _directly_ to the bare corner of the lab that contains a kettle and the few mugs fit for human use. The man is _predictable_.)

“Hermann?”

An indistinct noise of assent. The man is _predictable_ , and apparently cannot talk without tea.

“How’s the old man?”

His voice drifts back from the corner. “Ugh- as ever. Nonsense."

"There wasn't _small talk_ , was there Herms?"

"The smallest," says the voice from the tea cupboard. "And not a _word_ about future plans, curse him."  but I still think it’s _foolish_ to slack on the breach monitoring at this point. This would all entirely _new_ data, you understand.  We know what it looks like open, but not closed. And mark my words, that is the kind of thing that will come in handy if- well, god forbid-”

“ _Keinahora-_ ”

“-indeed- the breach were to re-open. And I know Marshall Hansen agrees with me, because _he_ mentioned-“

He had been meandering back to the table that now crosses the divide, mug in hand; he stops.

“Where did this come from?”

“What?”

“This.” The mug is slammed down; he’s picked up the page of notes.

“Hey, I was _working_ on-“

“This. Where did _this_ come from?” He rattles the paper.

“Oh- what? That’s just my notes. The pattern’s just a- a sketch. I was sketching. While I was thinking.”

Cogs are visibly turning in Hermann’s head. He slams a piece of white paper on the table in front of him.

“Do it again.” He demands.

“What, the drawing?”

“Yes. Do it again.”

“I- man, it was just doodling, I can’t, on command.”

“Well, what were you thinking about at the time?”

“Oh- uh. The- the breach. What would happen if it were to re-open.”

And that sounds like a confession, the ways he’s put it. He grabs up a pencil, and tries to relax back into what he was thinking about-

_free-_

And lets his hand trace across the paper. Herman snatches it up before he can complete the last turn.

“It’s a dragon-type curve.”

“A what-now? You know, for someone who claims not to understand poetry, you occasionally come out with-“

“A dragon curve. The fractal presentation from the rift. Newton, you’ve _drawn_ the energy signature from the active breach.”

“What?”

“It’s perfect. It’s a replica. This is how it would appear on the spectrometer. I sometimes-” he has grabbed up the paper, is scanning it almost greedily; his attention fractionating in time with the pattern. “And you said you did this free-hand?”

“Well- yeah, I was just-“ he grabs up a pencil, desperate for this not to be happening. He roughs out a circle, and-

Hermann is staring at his hand.

“What? Dude, what? I’m not even drawing anything!”

He’s always been cold-coloured; but now his face has gone on a sickish, vaguely curled white.

“Newton”, he says hoarsely, “you are _not_ right-handed.” 

He looks down at the offending hand. It suddenly seems very, very distant from him. He drops the pencil.

There is a moment of silence that resounds around the lab.

Carefully, he picks up the pencil, left-handed.

Shaking. His left hand is shaking. After a second, the right joins it.

They might not even be shaking _in phase_. 

“This is messed-up”, he finally says.

Hermann says nothing; the silence has the quality of mourning, as well as shock.

 

* * *

 

 He goes out, that evening.

If an MSc in Neuroimaging is useful for nothing else (and it _is_ useful for nothing else,) it is useful to wave over your head like a flag as you try to bully someone into supervising an MRI scan.

In three languages, as well. He’s proud of himself. Mandarin, English and cantonese- with liberal sprinklings of German, when he gets frustrated. Which he does, much to the ((to his mind) extremely _snotty_ ) MRI tech, who is being paid handsomely for this off-the-clock, under-the-radar job.

He’s in a former teaching hospital, way on the other side of the city. He may be mad, he may be- something else, but he’s not stupid. Not yet.

He has to fight not to jump out of the scanner, when he hears a soft gasp from the technician. The LEDs laser a cross on his forehead; theoretically, he should stay in place, exactly, where these red lines cross; it is bad practise to even twitch in the scanner; if it doesn’t completely screw the data up, it will make it even hard to see hiw he has messed himself up, brain-wise. But he is shaking so badly, surely, that this set is screwed up anyway; but he lies, waiting, until he hears the vrrrr of the MRI bed trying to move him back out, slowly, sedately.

The soft gasp from the tech lead breaks his heart. It breaks his heart, because it follows the soft _toing-toing kerCHUNK_  that means the structural scan is over; and so he leaps up, wiping away the tear that always forms when he is told not to blink.

It has to be-

 

* * *

 (...)

He can’t sleep.

Not that he doesn’t want to. God, he _wants_ to, so badly.

Newton paces his room; and he doesn’t dream; and whatever sleeps within him-

( _if_ something sleeps within him- he's still holding out hope ( _god,_ it sounds weird to say, but he is just _praying_ for a full psychotic breakdown complete with audio-visual and hypnogogic hallucination, anything to avoid the diagnosis of-)

whatever it is-

-it sleeps on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finishing this before the sequel wrecks it lol


	7. Chapter 7

It is soon.

It is soon, but he feels great, actually. He’s wearing the suit he used to wear for thesis defences, and sure he’s lost some weight, but it’s not _too_ scarecrow-y, he’s almost sure, and the scars from the worst of V-day have healed over, so he doesn’t look _too_ much like a recent lobotomy patient, and he managed ever to find a _tie_ , which he is 84% sure that he’s tied correctly. 

And sure he’s had like five five-hour energy drinks, but that just means 25 hours, right? That just means he has a _full day’s worth_ of energy to burn.  

“Oh, you’ve managed to dress like an adult. How novel.”

Hermann is leaning on his cane; the wind from the runway is flipping at his hair (he’s always been sadly resistant to hair products, or indeed grooming of any kind,) but someone- _someone_ must have gone shopping _for_ him, because he’s wearing something that _fits_. It’s black and sleek and lacks lapels, in a way that vaguely suggests early Blake’s 7, and heavily suggests designers getting paid too much for too little work.

“You’re one to talk. Was that jacket made _this_ century? Who kicked _you_ off the catwalk?” (He leans out a hand, and Hermann tics away-) “This can’t have been _your_ idea, Herms; I know for a fact you only own two suits, and one is the suit you wore to your bar Mitzvah; so where-”

“Manic as ever.” A blot of pink is riding high up on either cheekbone. “You know we’re supposed to try and _impress_ these people.”  

“I’m not complaining. Give us a twirl.”

He dodges out of the way of the cane; but Hermann is not frowning. There may even be the ghost of a suspicion of a smile.  

“There is a kernel of vanity somewhere in there, Dr Gottleib, I always knew it.”

Hermann never actually acknowledges a compliment; you have to watch for the way he sets his feet when he’s flustered, how he stares down at his shoes.

Hermann says, apparently to his brogues, “Just because I don’t _peacock_ around the lab in ludicrous t-shirts for _punk metal_ bands…“  

Yes, you have to be able to _hear_ the smile. It’s a form of communication more nuanced than most, but he’s had practise. “Just remember to say world peace if they ask you what your one wish is, Hermann, that’s all-“

There’s a flutter of noise; squawks from rubberneckers at the gate. Raleigh is waving from across the tarmac; behind him, Mako is emerging from the sleek, black car the PPDC sends out for their Very Importants.

Hermann waves back. As he does, he murmurs, “of course, you read the email.”

“Of course.” (He has not.)

“We have to impress them.”

“We do?”

“ _Newton_.”  

“Hey. The only thing I like better than fresh data is fresh grant money with which to _acquire_ data. I will charm these guys right out of their pants. Suits. Business suits. Whatever. ”   

As they fall in with the PPDC delegates, he thinks, now the only thing to do is shake a lot of hands, charm a lot of suits, and pray that no-one asks an awkward question.                                                                           

 

* * *

 

 

They are greeted in the meeting room by three unfamiliar faces. He’s never been especially good with faces, but anyway, the first thing you would notice about this trio is the little silver studs, in triplicate, that mean they are being faced down by a Major and two Captains.

They establish themselves as Thompson (60v) Krenning (60w) and Sallat (apparently so important she does not need a designation.) She stands at the back, frowning slightly. She has that generalised air of mistrust for the crowds around her that indicate she has been in the military a _long_ time.) 

Now _admittedly_? Admittedly. He’s _incredibly_ sleep-deprived. But it does _seem_ like these three people are, consciously or subconsciously, forming, _melting_ together, into one big khaki wall that separates the remains of the Shatterdome from any future funding opportunities.

But hey, they’re PPDC, right? They should know about him.

“Dr. Geizler?” says Dr Krenning. His face is not a good face.

Oh crap. They’re PPDC. They _know_ about him.

“I think we’ve thanked you _formally_ , Dr Geizler; but I don’t think we’ve yet offered our _informal_ thanks. _So_ pleased to put a real-life face to the name.” says Thompson. Thompson is English, (which could just about be what tips him over the edge; because Englishmen can say _anything_ and have it mean _literally the exact opposite_. It’s called irony, and he has yet to find an explanation for it that doesn’t fill him with complete and utter dread.)

“Dr Geizler?”

Like a marionette being jerked back to life, his hand (left- no, right-) rises to shake the proffered hand.

“Oh, yeah. No, the awards and stuff were great. Thanks. Thank you! I mean, no, it was a real honour.”

“And I understand you and Dr Gottleib are being considered for, ah, higher honours yet?” says Thompson. He’s smiling. (Does the smile mean what he thinks it means? Even for an English guy, the smile is sincere, right? He’s not about to whip the possibility of future funding out from under their feet with a _smile_ on his face, is he?)

Hermann descends like a vulture in a waistcoat. “So _terribly_ kind of you, Doctor Thompson, yes. All very covert at- at the moment, but we’ve had the call from Geneva.”

“Ah! Fantastic, fantastic!” Thompson is smiling in a faintly stunned way. “I always knew the Jaeger programme would turn out either geniuses or madmen. A fantastic result, either way.”

Hermann is working what little social graces he has to the bone. His face writhes as he tries to formulate a response to this sentence. “Yes- but of course- of course, the Nobel would be for our work mapping the Breach.”

“Oh- of course, how silly of me. And your excellent work on the morphology of the xenobiological races that the Progenitors produced. Quite thrilling, to be the leader in your field, I would imagine? Dr Geizler?”

“Hmm?” Mako and Raleigh are about two bundles of chatting people away. If they’re exchanging pleasantries at a rate of (let’s say) two per five seconds, and a conversationalists can only politely break it up and re-mingle with other groups after (let’s estimate) 16 meaningless pleasantries have been exchanged, then the time until he can rely on Mako and Raleigh to come and do their hero-pilot schtick over this guy would roughly be estimated as-

They’re looking.

“Oh- yeah, though there are some guys in Russia doing amazing things. Um,” he scrambles through the rolodex of his mind, “we’ve actually, um, set up a specimen exchange with the lab at the Institut Technichaya in Omsk; they’re performing some- basically carbon-dating, but with selenium?  Selenium-dating techniques that are really, um, stellar.” 

“Oh, _wonderful_. Ha-ha, I’d imagine you might be the only group of people in the world who felt a twinge of sadness when the kaiju were destroyed, yes?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Hate to see ‘em go, love to watch ‘em leave,” he says absently.

“I mean really, _any_ award to the Shatterdome should go towards those who managed to pull together such disparate skillsets and resources in such a desperate time,” says Hermann, desperately earnest. “Ii can’t begin to stress that enough. I believe Ms Mori-”

Ah, there she is. Looking fit and suitable and ready to lead. 32 seconds, incidentally.

There’s a lot of interest in Mako. Hero pilot, gifted engineer, and owner of a machine that can boast a literally three-storey tall whip-sword; she is the _definition_ of “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Or, whip-sword.  

(And Raleigh is _wonderfully decorative_. Hermann said that, once, in a way that indicated that he meant it to be a joke, but mostly it just came out mean; because Hermann Gottleib doesn’t particularly value people who only know the jaegers from the outside in.)

“Inside-out,” he says.

“Beg pardon, Doctor Geizler?” Chalmers is looking at him; but Hermann is looking at him _funny_.  

“Inside-out. Dr Gottlieb is planning on discussing fluctuations in patterns of energy from the Breach immediately pre-closure; because there was a strange inversion in energy readings when radiation stopped travelling though the rift. Isn’t that right, Dr Gottleib?” Mako says.

“Oh, “inside-out.” I see. We’re all very interested, of course…”

Sallat is giving him the hairy eyeball from across the room. Sallat could be three football fields away, and he would still be able to read the combination of condescension and mistrust that Sallat is putting out into the world, normally a general distrust, but in this case aimed specifically at him.    

“…though of course we have to make sure that knowledge sharing is fairly heavily regulated,” says Chalmers, smiling. “Of course, we would hate to see them fall into the wrong _hands_.”          

That snaps him back in. “What?”

Chalmers is still smiling. “Well, of course if any further resources _were_ to go to the Shatterdome, it would have to be _assured_ that no, ah, _external powers_ have any access to them.” 

He feels his brain quicken under a rush of righteous anger. “What- who are we going to _sell_ them to? The jaeger initiative was a _world_ effort, we’re not going to, like, sell secrets to the _space_ -Russians.”

“Well, you see, it’s funny you mention your friends in the Omsk Institut earlier; and Ms Mori, I understand the Jaeger programme is closely linked with certain French schools of Engineering.”

“Yeah, that’s called knowledge _exchange_ ,” he interrupts, “are you honestly telling me that you expect the Jaeger guys to build a _giant bipedal robot_ without open academic-“      

He produced a small, strangled noise; almost exactly like someone had dug a cane-ferrule into the dorsum of his foot.

“Theirs is someone I would like you to meet, Dr Geizler,” he hears Hermann say, serenely, as a grip like iron closes around his elbow.

“I have begged you- _begged_ you to read your emails,” Hermann sighs. “I think we can trust _them_ to do most of the talking for once, don’t you?”

“Do you think so?”

Hermann sighs again. “If you had even _read_ the Marshall’s-”

“The _former_ Marshall-“

“The _possibly_ -soon-to-be-former Marshall, Newton,  who said that we should, and I quote- “rub along as best you can, say nothing to anyone, listen to Mako, and don’t, whatever you do, talk to the higher-ups without me there.”

“I will when hell freezes over, who do they think did all the _work_? _How_ do they think we did all the work? How do they _expect_ us to _do_ all the work without free exchange of data?” 

Hermann takes a deep breath; and it strikes him suddenly that this does not sound typical. Normally, when he’s irritated- and that is often- he’s a little more vituperative. But there is a particularly conciliatory tone of his voice that is- unexpected; (and it’s the kind of thing that makes him want to ask _wait, have you been having dreams too_ -)

But-

“Yeah, yeah, sure. Cool it down, got it. You should- you should be going to get ready already. Ready. Right?” and, as the other man looks at him with a mixture of surprise, gratitude and honest bewilderment- “I have a scan to show you when we get back, okay, Hermann? Later? Don’t let me forget.”

And he makes his way back to the party. Well, “party”. Meeting. Conference. Committee shindig. Whatever. People are already starting to take their seats anyway. _Naturally_ , he won’t be sitting here; _naturally_ , as one half of K-Sci, he will be sitting on the stage, although (per the half-glimpsed former (?) commander’s email, he will just be, quote, “sitting there are looking wise.” He passes Thompson, Krenning, and the brick-faced Sallat, who is staring at a pamphlet on the PPDC as though it were a dagger in the hands of an assassin. Apparently, that is just how her face sits at rest.

They may not be terrible people after all. This might just be the five-hour energies finally kicking in, of course, but they might not be _terrible_ people, right?)

“Looking forward to the talk, Dr Geizler,” Chalmers flags him down as he passes.

(And it’s always the _second_ impression that counts, right?)

He manages to fix, or at least to _flatten_ , some of his hair. “Oh, it’ll mostly be Herm- it’ll mostly be Doctor Gottleib and Ms Mori. I’m here to, ha, make up the numbers,” he says. “You guys are with PPDC Co-Ordination, right? This should be right up your alley.”

“Oh, _Sallat_ is. Ben here is our medical man, and I’m working with the UN liason.”

“Oh- cool…” (Parts of his brain, you see, are always running off under their own direction; and one part is counting and re-counting the little silver studs, in triplicate, that decorate the shoulders of Chalmers. There are a _lot_ , he realises, now.) “But you know Mako, right?”

“Oh yes; I would never miss a chance to make a professional connection,” Chalmers says cheerfully.   

“It does always come down to a question of _professional_ over _personal_ connection, don’t you think, Dr Geizler?”

Englishmen can smile and make it mean _anything_.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It is later.

Hermann is staring at the screen with worried, uncomprehending eyes, like a man staring at an unfamiliar map, a map of a strange road.

He is not a biologist but he has a scientist’s eye for symmetry, the natural order of things; and even he can see the essential wrongness of this. White matter lessions, sprinkled throughout, like white stars on a grey sky; they begin to clump unpleasantly towards the frontal lobe. It would be better, somehow, if it was the one great thumbprint of dark grey; that would be healthier, somehow; more vital. The kind of thing you get by taking a baseball to the head; nothing that sunshine and exercise and severe rehabilitative therapy couldn’t cure. But here; the little pits of grey, the (he feels his stomach drop; the horror), the slight shrinkage and separation of gyri and sulci; and those little lesions, minature, insignificant really, except they’re not, cannot be; grazing on the frontal lobe, the _human_ lobe, like white mould on bread.

Hermann was tidying up his notes from the presentation; now they are lying in a loose, shuffled heap on his desk.

“Oh Newton,” says Hermann softly, “I am sorry.”

As if his house burned down. As if his cat got run over. As if the thing that contains _him_ isn’t hanging on by a thread.  

“And that’s all she wrote, right?” his throat is thick- too many energy drinks, time, no sleep, no _sleep_ \- and it comes out in a croak. “Pretty awful-looking, isn’t it? You, Hermann- you don’t know the first thing about brains, and that still looks undeniably goddamn awful, right?”

His face- never a pretty picture at the best of times, is doing something complicated.

“I’m sure we can- I’m sure there’s a way.” Hermann finishes.

“Not without resources. Not without Medical getting involved. Not just when everybody’s watching us,” he says gloomily.

There’s a horrible, grey pause; the kind of horrible, grey pause that occurs when one looks into one future and sees only fog.

Hermann rises suddenly, like an unexpected bill.

“Right.” He says, shaking out his blazer expectantly. “Right. Well, we can’t sit around _here_.”  

“Where else can we sit around?”

“You’re a _card,_ Newton, an absolute card,” he says, witheringly, “but this is _not_ the kind of shilly-shallying I expect from one of the men that closed the Breach. Come on; up-up-up. Work to be done.”

He looks-

He looks at this man, at this awful man, with his awful face, and his awful cheekbones, and the single laughline that has developed on only one side of his awful face (because only _Newt_ , and a few select others, he thinks, (with a hint of internally vocalised pride,) can _ever_ make him laugh), and his awful expression of worry that he’s failing to entirely conceal-

He rests his head in the cradle of his hands.

“Sounds good, Hermann. Sounds great. You go do that. I’m going to sit here and rot.”

Hermann totters across the lab’s dividing line. (It is starting to peel up in places, but- hey, they don’t need to fix it, right? It’ll all be gone soon.)

“Like _hell_ you will. If you have _any_ expectation of doing _anything_ \- foolish in the next few days, Newton, I swear to god, I-“

“You’ll what?”

“I’ll _stop it_.” Hermann’s awful face, with his awful cheekbones, and his awful look of worry, that he can’t quite disguise with irritation.

This-

They have never been good at communication, either of them.

(This frozen moment hangs for a long time; longer than words.) 

 

 

* * *

 

 

(He wakes up with his hands, his hands are already hooked into claws and it’s not- it’s not because of _them_ , it’s because in his dream he was trying- and it wasn’t swimming, exactly, it wasn’t standing, it was just _blue_ around him for miles in every direction, in every dimension, and how do you fight that? What do you grasp, kick against, get a hold of?

And _breathe_ -

And he couldn’t breathe, not here, not there, and he could feel that thin barrier between sleep and awareness and _their_ awareness, and he couldn’t break it, and for a terrible second he suspected that he wouldn’t be able to wake up and then he’s be _trapped_ -)

There’s a knock on the door. It’s 3:12. He knows, because the clock says so.

Behind the door is a person who looks very like Hermann Gottlieb. And it must be a clone, or some kind of _mutant interloper_ , because it is 3 _:12 in the goddamn morning_.

“It is 3:12 in the _goddamn-_ ” he is silenced abruptly. It is difficult to be anything else when a _futon_ has been handed to you. Futons tend to occupy one’s whole attention.

“It ‘s 3:12 in the morning,” mutters Hermann, stalking in, a dark shape against the reflection from the wall chromes, “and I could _hear_ you from five rooms over.” He turns; he cuts a far-too-thin shape against the white walls. “Spread that out, will you?”

“What? Oh.” The futon, octopus-like, had been making an energetic attempt to escape his grasp. He grabbed it by a selection of the available corners and attempted to wrestle it into submission. “Why?”

“Sychronous delta-wave activation.” Hermann says, crisply.

“I beg pardon?”

“Meaning; if you sleep around normal people, you might become a little bit more normal yourself. God, we can but _hope_.” Of _course_ he brought a fussy little glasses-case for his glasses. (He’s fiddling with it now, pointedly, as he speaks. He’s making an extensive study of the glasses case, in fact; far more extensive than it needs to be, because it saves him from having to make eye contact as he speaks. Frankly, Newt is prepared to take that as a blessing.)

“It works for the Jaeger pilots- proximity.” Says Hermann. “It _might_ work for us. And I would like to get more than _five_ hours of uninterrupted sleep this week, _thank_ you.”

The futon attempted something clever with a snagged button, so he puts his heel on the offending corner and elbow-drops the remaining mass. “No, that was just my first question. Why, but also how? And also, as a supplementary, what is that outfit even?”

“To answer them”, he snaps, “drift connectivity, I assume, and; I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t realise there was a _dress-code_ for being shaken out of sleep by one’s _idiotic_ _lab partner_. Do you have a spare blanket?”

Hermann has decided, in the best traditions of pip-pip don’t-let-the-side-down dulce-et-decorum-est-pro-die-fighting-in-a-European-land-war English stiff-upper-lippery, to push through his embarrassment. He feels this fact rise, joyful, in his chest.  

“Top closet shelf, on the rack. And you can tell me Herms, really; do you starch your boxers? And did you go back to the 50s to get said boxers? And who _actually_ wears a button tee to bed anymore? Does even your sleepwear have buttons?”

“It’s an undershirt, and I’ll thank you not to make personal comments.” He’s fiddling with the lamp.  

“ _Personal-_ don’t touch the lamp, I just got it the way I like it- _personal_ comments? Well, _I’m_ not the one who barged into his _idiotic lab partner’s_ room at _3 in the morning_ , in his underwear. This is sexual harassment, you know, Herms. Technically. You _are_ senior staff compared to me.”

“By a day!” says his silhouette, in front of the lamp.

“We’ll leave that up to Carol in H.R. Do you need memory foam or what?”

“This will be fine. There _is_ no Carol in H.R.” He pummels the pillow into compliance. 

“You would know, dude; you talk to them enough.”

It’s either a sigh of exasperation or the start of a yawn.

“We can debate the existence of non-existent H.R. personnel in the morning, I think?”

“What? Aw, come on, man. I’m _awake_ now.”

Hermann is a small grey lump who won’t be provoked to speech. After ten minutes, his breathing has levelled out. And surprisingly, he’s not as awake as he thought he was.

He sleeps; (blessedly, he sleeps; )

 and for some strange reason, he dreams of ammonia perchlorate;

but nothing else.


End file.
